Chapter 4 Internet Exercise

Choose your own company and repeat the analysis from Problem 1. You can get the data from MoneyCentral Investor at http://moneycentral.msn.com/investor/home.asp. To retrieve the data for your company, go to the Stocks area and enter the ticker symbol. Now choose Financial Results and then Statements from the menu on the left side of the screen. Display the annual income statement, select the entire data section and copy. Now paste this data directly into a new worksheet. The data will be pasted in HTML format. In Excel 2002 a Smart Tag will appear that will allow you to either "Keep Source Formatting" or "Match Destination Formatting." Experiment to see which one you like best. Repeat these steps for the balance sheet.

(Note: At the time of this writing, MoneyCentral uses data from Media General Financial Services. The data have been consolidated into consistent categories for easy comparison of different companies. However, there are frequent mistakes. If you need error free data, you should use a source such as Standard & Poor's Compustat or the SEC's Edgar database.)